... Foot and I left the hotel and got into his knackered old Mini. For Colin Wallace supporters like us it was quite an occasion: it had been announced that day that David Calcutt QC, after examining the evidence, had found that the 1975 Civil Service Appeal Board hearing of Colin Wallace's appeal against his dismissal had been rigged by the MOD, just as Wallace had claimed; and this meant that Wallace was eventually going to win his struggle with the British state. (Calcutt's judgement is reproduced in Lobster 20.) As we crawled through central London's traffic, Foot was exultant: 'All my life I have been trying to rattle the British establishment, and I've finally done ...

... through Whitehall at Tony Blair's talk of Iraq being a threat (see 'Iraq', above), made some further comments on BBC Radio 4. 'There was a culture of news management which came in after 1997 which I had not seen before and intelligence got swept up in that.' During the bombing of Yugoslavia the pressure from the MOD press office to come up with good news was intense. Morrison said: 'What I did, in effect, was within my crisis staff, set up in effect my own press office to handle the MoD press office. I took a very senior and tough-minded analyst and told him: "This is your job, to keep the ...

... , which established the DIY trend subsequently followed by, for example, Julie Ward's father, or Ken Bigley's family. However, an earlier example pointed the way: the 1980s battle of Helen Smiths father, a retired policeman, to prove that his daughter, a nurse, was murdered in Saudi Arabia. This pitched him against spook, MOD and FO officials alike – along with the British class system – who perceived state and private sector interests to be best served by cynical cover-up of a heinous crime. Concurrent with the DIY, has been growing, sophisticated, public awareness of the inherent conflicts of interests and countless hypocrisies within the system: e.g. government's pretence that it ...

... ) to John Scarlett (with a copy to Sir David Oman) regarding leaks to the media of Scarlett's note to Alastair of 20th September 2002. He refers to MI5's analysis of the "45 minute report" and highlights the original circulation of the document to various departments. The usual suspects are there: SIS, MI5, GCHQ and MOD get between 7 copies for MI5 and 20 copies for MI6. But also listed are 32 (yes 32) copies for the DTI. Why? I wonder. Some kind of export initiative?' Or the DTI is full of spooks under cover? Hearing No. 10 spokesman Tom Kelly telling some British journalists that Dr David Kelly ...

... dealing with the poor. He is the first person to go from political adviser to civil servant as Director of the Cabinet Office's Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) and Forward Strategy Unit. (5) The PIU reviewed the UK's energy policy at a 4 July 2001 seminar: Mulgan introduces, hands over to Chair, Kevin Tebbit (MOD). Then there are presentations by Sian Davies (the Henley Centre, which has several Demos members), Bob Tyrrell (Demos) and Ged Davis (Shell, a Demos funder) and closing comments from Mulgan. Lunch everyone? (6) He's also a trustee of thePolitical Quarterly(with BAP's Richard Holme) and Prospect ...

... affairs was subject to professional confidentiality and thus immune to any judicial inquiry. Beginnings Mills and Tessa Jowells connections with Labour go back to the 1960s when they were both Labour councillors. Educated at Oxford, Mills was a young civil servant at what became the Ministry of Defence and part of the 'fast-track' for promotion intake. He left the MOD after only a few years, taking the bar examination and becoming a barrister. Though not yet a qualified lawyer, during his brief career at the MOD, his work was sometimes connected with legal aspects of the intelligence services. He was a minor member of that London NW1/NW5 set(2) and still lives in Kentish ...

... secretary general. Possibly even busier on the war in recent months than all three BAP veterans, though less publicly so, was another early member of the BAP, Gloria Craig. Twenty-six years in the Ministry of Defence when Robertson became New Labour Defence Secretary in 1997, she is now its director of general security and safety. Her former MoD colleague, Jonathan Day, moved with Robertson to NATO HQ in Brussels to become director of his private office. He was signed up to the BAP in 1987, the same year as Mandelson, along with Susan Richards, who now edits the Open Democracy web site, and Michael Maclay, the ex-Foreign Office man who became Mandelson's colleague ...

... concerns Liberty itself, in conjunction with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (www.iccl.ie) and British-Irish Rights Watch (www.birw.org), who believe their phone and fax communications between Britain and Ireland, including confidential legally-privileged material are being routinely intercepted by GCHQ and processed by the security and intelligence services. Communications between Britain and Ireland were intercepted via an MOD installation at Capenhurst in Cheshire and later, it is claimed, by the Echelon system. The rights groups say that RIPA fails to provide adequate safeguards to protect individual privacy, a principle enshrined in the HRA and ECHR. (3) In a separate case, these three organisations are taking the government to the European Court of Human ...

... relaxed. The IPT's first oral hearings concern these matters. Other cases reported to have made a complaint to the IPT include Liberty, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and British-Irish Rights Watch, (23) partly over allegations that phone calls between Britain and Ireland, including legally privileged material confidential to the complainants, were routinely intercepted by an MoD installation at Capenhurst, Cheshire, and later by the Echelon system. The rights groups say that the RIP act fails to provide adequate safeguards to protect individual privacy, a right established by the HRA and ECHR. The Labour peer, Lord Ahmed, also complained that transcripts of his phone conversations were given to ministers. Unusually, in ...

... Marxism /Lying Marketing scam. I didn't get to see your earlier piece on the Economist Intelligence Unit career link, unfortunately, so what I have to say may be old news, but here goes. Reading Wensley Clarkson's book The Valkyrie Operation (1998) recently, I was struck by his remark that: 'Between 1970 and 1990 the MoD recruited dozens of personnel after they had been discovered at Britain's most highly acclaimed strategic studies centres, Oxbridge, Lancaster and Aberystwyth.' (p.19). I don't know how much reliance can be put on the authors' reference to British universities, what the centres at 'Oxbridge' are (though St. Antony's, Oxford is known ...